Saturday, December 19, 2009

Proverbs

A fish always starts to smell at the head. These effin CEOs who drain the value right out of their companies, thinking only about ROI, wanting to look good on the Street. Self-aggrandizing egotists who couldn't care less about the little people they've got working for them, who only care about their golfing buddies in the board room. Who couldn't care less about the quality of the products they foist upon the consumers for whom they have contempt. Dontcha love their sloganeering? You gotta laugh at their well-crafted corporate mission statements, their public hand-wringing, their tax-deductible donations to charities. Who gives a shite how green their offices are? Wouldn't you like a career in public relations? Listen to these empty suits deliver their ersatz Prince of Denmark soliloquies -- "the hardest thing is letting people go, making the tough decisions, you know, the stuff that keeps you awake at night..." You believe that line, poot? Makes you retch. Whenever they make a simple declarative statement -- something like, "I read the books we publish" -- you can be sure that they're giving you the business. Marcin says, "Hey! we just had one of them in the White House for eight years and look where it got us. Nowhere."

The unexpected always happens. If so, how can we claim to be masters of our own destiny? You were bumming around without giving a second thought to something called "a career." Slicing baloney down at Fritzie's. But somehow you got hired by a big outfit in an industry that hadn't started croaking yet. You earned a decent living for a few years selling books. Then one morning you went into the big building and started putting out fires. People forget there was a time when putting out fires wasn't the norm in corporate America. After a while, you thought to yourself let the effin fires burn. This position of yours -- mostly it sucked the life out of you, but the perks were okay and the benefits were good, so you kept your head down, your thoughts to yourself, and marched onward. Promotions. Raises. Money. Ahh! Money. Then poof! Your position was eliminated. Sayonara, Charlie. Dontcha wish you'd read The Black Swan earlier? And dontcha wish your Personal Financial Advisor had read it too? You were back at square one, which was totally unexpected, especially after having made it to squares two, three, and four. Unexpectedly. Quist used to say, "Hey, poot, you can make your plans, execute 'em perfectly, and still come a cropper. Might as well play the lottery -- who knows when lightning will strike."